praetors, who, just like the two consuls and six praetors of Rome, were invested with the supreme authority in war and peace. The Latin language, which was even then the prevailing language among the Marsians and Picentes, continued in official use, but the Samnite language which predominated in Southern Italy was placed side by side with it on a footing of equality; and the two were made use of alternately on the silver pieces which the new Italian state began to coin in its own name after Roman models and after the Roman standard, thus appropriating likewise the monopoly of coinage which Rome had exercised for two centuries. It is evident from these arrangements - and was, indeed a matter of course-that the Italians now no longer thought of wresting equality of rights from the Romans, but purposed to annihilate or subdue them and to form a new state. But it is also obvious that their constitution was nothing but a pure copy of that of Rome or, in other words, was the ancient polity handed down by tradition among the Italian nations from time immemorial: - the organization of a city instead of the constitution of a state, with primary assemblies as unwieldy and useless as the Roman comitia, with a governing corporation which contained within it the same elements of oligarchy as the Roman senate, with an executive administered in like manner by a plurality of coordinate supreme magistrates. This imitation descended to the minutest details; for instance, the title of consul or praetor held by the magistrate in chief command was after a victory exchanged by the general of the Italians also for the title of Imperator. Nothing in fact was changed but the name; on the coins of the insurgents the same image of the gods appears, the inscription only being changed from Roma to Italia. This Rome of the insurgents was distinguished - not to its advantage - from the original Rome merely by the circumstance, that, while the latter had at any rate an urban development, and its unnatural position intermediate between a city and a state had formed itself at least in a natural way, the new Italia was nothing at all but a place of congress for the insurgents, and it was by a pure fiction of law that the inhabitants of the peninsula were stamped as burgesses of this new capital. But it is significant that in this case, where the sudden amalgamation of a number of isolated cantons into a new political unity might have so naturally suggested the idea of a representative constitution in the modern sense, no trace of any such idea occurs; in fact the very opposite course was followed[12], and the communal organization was simply reproduced in a far more absurd manner than before. Nowhere perhaps is it so clearly apparent as in this instance, that in the view of antiquity a free constitution was inseparable from the appearance of the sovereign people in person in the primary assemblies, or from a city; and that the great fundamental idea of the modern republican-constitutional state, viz. the expression of the sovereignty of the people by a representative assembly - an idea without which a free state would be a chaos - is wholly modern. Even the Italian polity, although in its somewhat representative senates and in the diminished importance of the comitia it approximated to a free state, never was able in the case either of Rome or of Italia to cross the boundary-line.
Thus began, a few months after the death of Drusus, in the winter of 663-4, the struggle - as one of the coins of the insurgents represents it - of the Sabellian ox against the Roman she-wolf. Both sides made zealous preparations: in Italia great stores of arms, provisions, and money were accumulated; in Rome the requisite supplies were drawn from the provinces and particularly from Sicily, and the long-neglected walls were put in a state of defence against any contingency. The forces were in some measure equally balanced. The Romans filled up the blanks in their Italian contingents partly by increased levies from the burgesses and from the inhabitants - already almost wholly Romanized - of the Celtic districts on the south of the Alps, of whom 10,000 served in the Campanian army alone[13], partly by the contingents of the Numidians and other transmarine nations; and with the aid of the free cities in Greece and Asia Minor they collected a war fleet[14]. On both sides, without reckoning garrisons, as many as 100,000 soldiers were brought into the field[15], and in the ability of their men, in military tactics and armament, the Italians were nowise inferior to the Romans.
The conduct of the war was very difficult both for the insurgents and for the Romans, because the territory in revolt was very extensive and a great number of fortresses adhering to Rome were scattered up and down in it: so that on the one hand the insurgents found themselves compelled to combine a siege-warfare, which broke up their forces and consumed their time, with the protection of an extended frontier; and on the other hand the Romans could not well do otherwise than combat the insurrection, which had no proper centre, simultaneously in all the insurgent districts. In a military point of view the insurgent country fell into two divisions; in the northern, which reached from Picenum and the Abruzzi to the northern border of Campania and embraced the districts speaking Latin, the chief command was held on the Italian side by the Marsian Quintus Silo, on the Roman side by Publius Rutilius Lupus, both as consuls; in the southern, which included Campania, Samnium, and generally the regions speaking Sabellian, the Samnite Gaius Papius Mutilus commanded as consul of the insurgents, and Lucius Julius Caesar as the Roman consul. With each of the two commanders-in-chief there were associated on the Italian side six, on the Roman side five, lieutenant-commanders, each of whom conducted the attack or defence in a definite district, while the consular armies were destined to act more freely and to strike the decisive blow. The most esteemed Roman officers, such as Gaius Marius, Quintus Catulus, and the two consulars of experience in the Spanish war, Titus Didius and Publius Crassus, placed themselves at the disposal of the consuls for these posts; and though the Italians had not names so celebrated to oppose to them, yet the result showed that their leaders were in a military point of view nowise inferior to the Romans.
The offensive in this thoroughly desultory war was on the whole on the side of the Romans, but was nowhere decisively assumed even on their part. It is surprising that the Romans did not collect their troops for the purpose of attacking the insurgents with a superior force, and that the insurgents made no attempt to advance into Latium and to throw themselves on the hostile capital. We are how ever too little acquainted with their respective circumstances to judge whether or how they could have acted otherwise, or to what extent the remissness of the Roman government on the one hand and the looseness of the connection among the federate communities on the other contributed to this want of unity in the conduct of the war. It is easy to see that with such a system there would doubtless be victories and defeats, but the final settlement might be very long delayed; and it is no less plain that a clear and vivid picture of such a war - which resolved itself into a series of engagements on the part of individual corps operating at the same time, sometimes separately, sometimes in combination - cannot be prepared out of the remarkably fragmentary accounts which have come down to us.
The first assault, as a matter of course, fell on the fortresses adhering to Rome in the insurgent districts, which in all haste closed their gates and carried in their moveable property from the country. Silo threw himself on the fortress designed to hold in check the Marsians, the strong Alba, Mutilus on the Latin town of Aesernia established in the heart of Samnium: in both cases they encountered the most resolute resistance. Similar conflicts probably raged in the north around Firmum, Atria, Pinna, in the south around Luceria, Beneventum, Nola, Paestum, before and while the Roman armies gathered on the borders of the insurgent country. After the southern army under Caesar had assembled in the spring of 664 in Campania which for the most part held by Rome, and had provided Capua - with its domain so important for the Roman finances - as well as the more important allied cities with garrisons, it attempted to assume the offensive and to come to the aid of the smaller divisions sent on before it to Samnium and Lucania under Marcus Marcellus and Publius Crassus. But Caesar was repulsed by the Samnites and Marsians under Publius Vettius Scato with severe loss, and the important town of Venafrum thereupon passed over to the insurgents, into whose hands it delivered its Roman garrison. By the defection of this town, which lay on the military road from Campania to Samnium, Aesernia was isolated, and that fortress already vigorously assailed found itself now exclusively dependent on the courage and perseverance of its defenders and their commandant Marcellus. It is true that an incursion, which Sulla happily carried out with the same artful audacity as formerly his expedition to Bocchus, relieved the hard-pressed Aesernians for a moment; nevertheless they were after an obstinate resistance compelled by the extremity of famine to capitulate towards the end of the year.
